Scarily Good Seasonal Marketing

Scarily good marketing doesn’t have to be scarily expensive. It’s a style of marketing that accounts for both your target audience and any special occasions your audience likely observes. Making sure your campaigns suit the season is essential, especially if it gives you the opportunity to create or market a line of themed products or services, like werewolf hunting! Just think of Starbucks’ Pumpkin Spice Latte: it’s only available for a limited time and it’s only available around Halloween. This is a very clever marketing ploy designed to encourage people to get into the spirit of things and to buy before the offer expires.

To get you started, you could think of creating a marketing campaign around any one of the following holidays:

Halloween

Christmas

Thanksgiving (if you’re in the USA)

Guy Fawkes

New Year

Easter

St. Patrick’s Day

Or whatever celebration your business thinks would be relevant to the preferred target market.

One company that pays special attention to the season is Google, if just because every time there’s a celebration or occasion of some importance, Google turns its logo into a doodle (or an interactive animation) as with this Halloween’s Google Doodle. It might not push any particular Google service, but it is a reminder of Google’s own branding – relevant, up to date, and not afraid to have a bit of fun.

So, how can you leverage the seasons to sell/promote your own services or products? It may be too late for Halloween marketing, but what about getting ready for Guy Fawkes or if you need a bit more time, Christmas?

Here are some marketing ideas you can use no matter the occasion:

Run a competition – nothing gets interaction quite like offering people the chance to win something.

This Halloween Topshop did just that. In order to promote their ‘Witching Hour’ Halloween fashion collection, they invited their Twitter fans to tweet Halloween tips or a picture of their Halloween outfit. The competition runs between the 26th and 31st of October and for each tweet judged the best each day, someone is rewarded a £100/£150 Topshop giftcard.

According to Topshop’s chief marketing officer, this campaign is all about synthesizing the digital and the physical world and about creating an experience that will driver conversation in the community around a particular moment.

Make a video – videos are a fantastic way to attract visitors plus they’re a fun alternative to written content and they have the potential to go viral.

Check out the Halloween themed advertisement for Snickers:

Create a bundle of products – bundle a selection of products together for the occasion. For example if you sell food, you might consider creating a vampire survival kit containing garlic, pasta and various stake shaped wooden cooking utensils. Or if you’re a toy store, you might consider bundling a selection of products into a Christmas stocking.

Create themed merchandise – if you’re a company like Cadbury’s you may have something to suit the season. Think of the Cadbury’s Screme Egg – available only around Halloween time.

Run a social media campaign – this might be to promote one of your other marketing efforts – like a video or a seasonal bundle

Adjust your website to suit the season

Like Google, at Xanthos, we decided to have a little bit of Halloween fun. Thankfully the newest member of our team – stellar developer Peter – had the perfect idea: flying bats, a graveyard themed background and a gory blog font. For any users or clients that regularly read our blog it’ll hopefully mean a smile. At the very least, we’d like it to show that while we are serious about business and professionalism, we’re not afraid to be creative and to have a little fun (so long as it gets results!).

The point:

Seasonal marketing is meant to allow you an additional opportunity to reach out and engage with your target audience. It’s also meant to show the world that your company, brand or staff do occasionally have fun! If you need a little bit of digital marketing help, whether that be SEO related, email campaign related or something else, do get in touch.